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Tag Archives: placeholders

Who’s John Doe in Germany? Posted by on Jul 28, 2020

If you don’t want to keep somebody’s name anonymous or if you simply need a placeholder, a common name to use is John Doe for men and Jane Doe for women, or Joe Bloggs or John Smith… There’s quite a list. How do we do it in Germany? The “Example Man” In Germany, we almost…

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The German Word ‘Zeug’ Posted by on Jun 26, 2019

Guten Tag! Today we’re looking at a very small, but very versatile German word: das Zeug. Simply put, Zeug (das) means thing, or stuff. It is quite common to hear people say things like ‘Was ist das für ein Zeug?’ (‘What kind of thing/stuff is this?’). Zeug can refer to one thing, or several things…

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5 More German Placeholders Posted by on Jun 24, 2019

Guten Tag! We briefly touched on German placeholders in this post, about the words Krimskrams (stuff, junk) and Dingsbums (thingy, thingymajig). Then we looked at German placeholders for names, such as John Doe. A placeholder (der Platzhalter) is a generic word you use in place of a real word. This might be because you can’t…

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German Placeholders: Names Posted by on Jun 19, 2019

Guten Tag! We briefly touched on German placeholders in this post, about the words Krimskrams (stuff, junk) and Dingsbums (thingy, thingymajig). Now we’re going to look at lots more placeholders in German, starting with German names. A placeholder is a generic word you use in place of a real word. This might be because you…

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German Things And Stuff Posted by on Jun 12, 2019

Guten Tag! Do you ever have moments where you can’t remember the word for something? How about when there’s a pile of what can only be described as ‘stuff’? Just like in English, German has words that you can use in these situations. Here are two of them: Krimskrams and Dingsbums. Krimskrams The first word…

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